Ten years after he made his feature debut with Disorder in 1986, Olivier Assayas decided it was time to turn his attentions to the French film industry for his sixth picture. Written in ten days, and shot in less than a month, Irma Vep provides a mid-nineties' amalgam of François Truffaut's Day for Night and Rainer Werner Fassbinder's Beware of a Holy Whore.

French filmmaker René Vidal (Day for Night's Jean-Pierre Léaud) is commissioned by a TV company to direct a remake of Louis Feuillade's classic silent-era serial, Les Vampires. Maggie Cheung (playing a version of herself) is cast in the central role and heads to Paris for filming – where she finds herself amid the chaos of artistic differences, petty rivalries and the immense egos which make up a film set.

Irma Vep is Assayas at his lightest and most playful – simultaneously a gently satirical dig at the state of French cinema and a love letter to his female star.

SPECIAL EDITION CONTENTS

• 2K restoration from the original negative, supervised and approved by Olivier Assayas
• High Definition (1080p) Blu-ray presentation
• Original 2.0 Stereo DTS-HD Master Audio
• Optional English subtitles
• Audio commentary by writer-director Olivier Assayas and critic Jean-Michel Frodon
• On the Set of Irma Vep, a 30-minute behind-the-scenes featurette with optional commentary by Assayas and Frodon
• Interview with Assayas and critic Charles Tesson
• Interview with actors Maggie Cheung and Nathalie Richard
• Man Yuk: A Portrait of Maggie Cheung, a 1997 short film by Assayas
• Black and white rushes
• Theatrical Trailer
• Reversible sleeve featuring original and newly commissioned artwork by Peter Strain
• FIRST PRESSING ONLY: Illustrated collector’s booklet featuring new writing on the film by critic Neil Young

This is very tempting, but I wonder if we can expect an equivalent US release in the near future, since there are no newly commissioned extras (except the essay, presumably). Looks like Zeitgeist, who released the US DVD in 2008, was the print/permissions source for a US screening late last year, and the previous DVD release was in 1998, so it would probably be safe to assume US rights were a 10-year block and are/will soon be up for grabs again?